we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Discuss arguments for existence of God and faith in general. Any aspect of any orientation toward religion/spirituality, as long as it is based upon a positive open to other people attitude.

Moderator:Metacrock

User avatar
fleetmouse
Posts:1814
Joined:Tue Jan 22, 2008 9:57 am
Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by fleetmouse » Mon Apr 08, 2013 9:46 am

Metacrock wrote:
Meta has talked about energy in the context of the mental and the spiritual before and I'm not sure if it's an analogy or literal so I'll invite him to step in here.

(edit: this mind = energy idea isn't my position, exactly, but it's an interesting way to explore the notions of physicality and interaction)
Well I'm not sure myself. I think that's like asking me to define the indefinable. How can we really know when we don't even know what energy is really? It seems to lead to a big circular argument, where energy is mind but mind is energy and energy is mind, whatever.

It wouldn't bother me too much if we found that mind is a form of energy. that wouldn't supet any kind of SN or idealist apple cart I have hidden away.
What's really funny and revealing is that your criterion for whether energy is an acceptable component or substance for the mind seems to be that energy is mysterious. :mrgreen:

So tell me, would all energy be conscious or only certain forms of energy, and which ones?

User avatar
Metacrock
Posts:10046
Joined:Tue Jan 22, 2008 8:03 am
Location:Dallas
Contact:

Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by Metacrock » Mon Apr 08, 2013 2:05 pm

fleetmouse wrote:
Metacrock wrote:
Meta has talked about energy in the context of the mental and the spiritual before and I'm not sure if it's an analogy or literal so I'll invite him to step in here.

(edit: this mind = energy idea isn't my position, exactly, but it's an interesting way to explore the notions of physicality and interaction)
Well I'm not sure myself. I think that's like asking me to define the indefinable. How can we really know when we don't even know what energy is really? It seems to lead to a big circular argument, where energy is mind but mind is energy and energy is mind, whatever.

It wouldn't bother me too much if we found that mind is a form of energy. that wouldn't supet any kind of SN or idealist apple cart I have hidden away.
What's really funny and revealing is that your criterion for whether energy is an acceptable component or substance for the mind seems to be that energy is mysterious. :mrgreen:

So tell me, would all energy be conscious or only certain forms of energy, and which ones?
I think what it reveals is that you want to pretend everything is straightforward and easily resolved by science and there's nothing to wonder about. It further reveals that I'm honest about what we can can't explain.
Have Theology, Will argue: wire Metacrock
Buy My book: The Trace of God: Warrant for belief

User avatar
met
Posts:2813
Joined:Mon Jun 16, 2008 1:05 pm

Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by met » Mon Apr 08, 2013 3:02 pm

Seems an arbitrary call to me. Is the universe mysterious? Or is energy/change/movement mysterious? Just a sense that maybe some people have and some don't. It would be hard to argue, analytically. We only have experience of the one universe, so there's no more or less mysterious other universes to compare this one to....

Can we imagine possible other universes with greater and lesser degrees of mysteriousity than ours? :shock: Even that seems a little stretchy....
The “One” is the space of the “world” of the tick, but also the “pinch” of the lobster, or that rendezvous in person to confirm online pictures (with a new lover or an old God). This is the machinery operative...as “onto-theology."
Dr Ward Blanton

User avatar
Metacrock
Posts:10046
Joined:Tue Jan 22, 2008 8:03 am
Location:Dallas
Contact:

Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by Metacrock » Mon Apr 08, 2013 3:31 pm

met wrote:Seems an arbitrary call to me. Is the universe mysterious? Or is energy/change/movement mysterious? Just a sense that maybe some people have and some don't. It would be hard to argue, analytically. We only have experience of the one universe, so there's no more or less mysterious other universes to compare this one to....

Can we imagine possible other universes with greater and lesser degrees of mysteriousity than ours? :shock: Even that seems a little stretchy....

simple way to find out. explain to me what energy is? cut tot he chase we going to go through the world of atoms and subatomic particle until we get the point where we are saying it's quarks and bozons and so on. what are those? keep going utnil we get to a point that we don't know. no one can tell me what they are made of. I've over and over and it comes to this:

they are made charges.

what are charges?

they are things that are made of more charges.

so we don't really know.
Have Theology, Will argue: wire Metacrock
Buy My book: The Trace of God: Warrant for belief

User avatar
met
Posts:2813
Joined:Mon Jun 16, 2008 1:05 pm

Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by met » Mon Apr 08, 2013 4:09 pm

I think the closest thing we could say is... energy is just movement. Of various kinds.
The “One” is the space of the “world” of the tick, but also the “pinch” of the lobster, or that rendezvous in person to confirm online pictures (with a new lover or an old God). This is the machinery operative...as “onto-theology."
Dr Ward Blanton

User avatar
Metacrock
Posts:10046
Joined:Tue Jan 22, 2008 8:03 am
Location:Dallas
Contact:

Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by Metacrock » Tue Apr 09, 2013 5:54 am

met wrote:I think the closest thing we could say is... energy is just movement. Of various kinds.

that's not very meaningful if you can't explain what's moving. my point is Fleet wants to make out like I'm some kind of mystagog just finding mysteries for the love of mystery but I think i have a valid point here.
Have Theology, Will argue: wire Metacrock
Buy My book: The Trace of God: Warrant for belief

User avatar
fleetmouse
Posts:1814
Joined:Tue Jan 22, 2008 9:57 am

Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by fleetmouse » Wed Apr 10, 2013 8:55 pm

If you're going to take the position that everything is equally mysterious, then "mysterious" clearly doesn't mean much. You might as well say that everything is schklorgle. The mind and a soda straw are both equally mysterious and equally schklorgle. So why are we doing philosophy of mind instead of philosophy of soda straws?

User avatar
mdsimpson92
Posts:2187
Joined:Thu Feb 10, 2011 6:05 pm
Location:Tianjin, China

Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by mdsimpson92 » Thu Apr 11, 2013 12:25 am

fleetmouse wrote: If you're going to take the position that everything is equally mysterious, then "mysterious" clearly doesn't mean much. You might as well say that everything is schklorgle. The mind and a soda straw are both equally mysterious and equally schklorgle. So why are we doing philosophy of mind instead of philosophy of soda straws?
Because that's a bit dangerous, those ideas will suck you in.......I will now go back to the corner for that pun.



In terms of criterion, while I won't mind that these things are absolutely air tight, I do think that they can be helpful in terms of usefulness as a concept and elegance. I do mention that panprotopsychism is not at all incompatible with physicalism, just not the more reductive versions. I also heard that it could match with a weak type of emergence. But yeah, while I think that something is indeed mysterious, I don't think we should just stop and slap on the label "the mysterious" to it and call it a day.
Julia: It's all... a dream...
Spike Spiegel: Yeah... just a dream...

User avatar
Metacrock
Posts:10046
Joined:Tue Jan 22, 2008 8:03 am
Location:Dallas
Contact:

Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by Metacrock » Thu Apr 11, 2013 6:45 am

fleetmouse wrote:If you're going to take the position that everything is equally mysterious, then "mysterious" clearly doesn't mean much. You might as well say that everything is schklorgle. The mind and a soda straw are both equally mysterious and equally schklorgle. So why are we doing philosophy of mind instead of philosophy of soda straws?
\
O I don' think I said anything about everything being mysterious. quite a few things are not mysterious at all.

Remember what I said about the easy way to find out is to explain to me what energy is. I'm still waiting.
Have Theology, Will argue: wire Metacrock
Buy My book: The Trace of God: Warrant for belief

User avatar
fleetmouse
Posts:1814
Joined:Tue Jan 22, 2008 9:57 am

Re: we gotta get this thing kick started again.

Post by fleetmouse » Thu Apr 11, 2013 11:17 am

mdsimpson92 wrote:Because that's a bit dangerous, those ideas will suck you in.......I will now go back to the corner for that pun.
http://sadtrombone.com
In terms of criterion, while I won't mind that these things are absolutely air tight, I do think that they can be helpful in terms of usefulness as a concept and elegance. I do mention that panprotopsychism is not at all incompatible with physicalism, just not the more reductive versions. I also heard that it could match with a weak type of emergence. But yeah, while I think that something is indeed mysterious, I don't think we should just stop and slap on the label "the mysterious" to it and call it a day.
I don't think you can escape some sort of emergence since we have to account for why rocks and trees seem unconscious compared to dogs and people. Now where the physicalist and panprotopsychist agree is that "stuff" for lack of a better term - we can call it matter, energy, space and time - has "what it takes" - the raw capacity to become human or dog level conscious given the right circumstances.

The difference is how far down the stack of supervenience you want to push consciousness or qualia or at least something more like them than unlike them. And it seems to me the further you push down consciousness and qualia in a more fully formed state, the more it looks like a "little men in the radio" style argument - say, as an analogy, you can't explain how a radio works, yet you're sophisticated enough to know there aren't little men in it, but you somehow feel that the radio is so complex and inexplicable that there must be at least something "little-man-like" at even the lowest levels of the substance that constitutes the radio.

Know what I mean? The panprotopsychist or panexperientialist answer gives you the illusion of being an answer because the real problem is deferred intact. So I don't understand why people treat the hard problem as insoluble off the bat, instead of acknowledging that there's a hard problem, that our knowledge has limits, and let's roll up our sleeves and get cracking. (I think Daniel Dennett's solution of merely refusing to acknowledge the hard problem is also a dodge but in a different direction)
Last edited by fleetmouse on Thu Apr 11, 2013 11:26 am, edited 3 times in total.

Post Reply